Russell King didn’t begin his career in transport, quite of lot of those who end up making a dent in the urban world don’t. He came in sideways, from biochemistry, to finance, then to politics. But somewhere between overseeing the regeneration of Battersea and reforming Sydney’s transport system, he became, in his words, “a transport tragic.” His story isn’t only about delivering new transit projects though, but about how belief and lining up the right kind of governance can unlock big change … although that can be a pretty fragile state of affairs.
Our conversation was less a lament about why transport is broken, but a revealing, inside look at how things can actually get built, and why that doesn’t happen nearly enough.
Rail lines are city shaping
Where you put a rail line, how many stations you build, whether it’s connected to housing or left isolated can make or break a neighbourhood. It determines what kind of city you get, what kind of commutes people endure, where housing demand flows and how the local economy evolves.
Too often though, governments treat infrastructure as an isolated engineering problem. They optimise for cost or construction feasibility, not for how people live. “One of the failures we often see is a failure to integrate the transport and the land use around rail stations and rail lines,” Russell explains. The result is you get transport projects that don’t enable densification, and densification that’s built where not enough transport exists. “It’s really poor thinking, and you see it around the world. And it’s because that tension between the two often exists.”
Much of that tension is structural too; “In many jurisdictions, urban planning sits completely separately from transport. They’re completely different disciplines. And they don’t like working together.” The engineers build a line, the planners zone some housing, often in different places. That gap costs cities dearly, both financially and socially.
So when something does come together, it’s worth paying attention. That’s what made the Northern Line extension into Nine Elms so relevant. “We had an integrated urban planning and transport function within the council,” Russell recalls. “So the Nine Elms regeneration area did both at the same time—and understood the benefits of doing both.”
Nine Elms wasn’t some textbook example of master planning from above. It was sparked by private interest, landowners and developers who saw potential if the Tube could reach the site. “They came to us and said, ‘Can we just get a Northern Line extension here? We’ll put money in.’” That might sound fanciful, but Wandsworth didn’t dismiss it.
“Most places would’ve said, ‘Developers’ pie in the sky—get real.’ But we ran the numbers. Could you fund it with increased density and developer contributions? Add in business rate uplift? The answer came back as yes. And pretty comfortably.”
Still, councils don’t build underground train lines, that’s Transport for London’s job. But Wandsworth had something many councils lack: the political connections and confidence to escalate the idea. “We were very lucky,” Russell says. “The mayor at the time was Boris, and his chief of staff was the former leader of Wandsworth Council.” The Transport Minister was a local MP. “She got it. So we basically ended up with a whole bunch of people who were all supportive, who could go to the treasurer and say, ‘Here’s a good project.’”
What followed was almost unthinkable by London standards: speed. “Normally London infrastructure takes about three decades to debate. This one got up relatively quickly, and has been built and is very successful.” It wasn’t just a new bit of Underground line, it was a much needed housing enabler, a density unlock and a move with long term value.
Most importantly, it actually worked. “It worked from many perspectives,” Russell says. “The developers benefited, the council got more housing, the city got more transport options and the numbers stacked up.”
That shouldn’t be a once in a generation alignment. But without integrated planning, aligned politics and a mindset open to value creation rather than cost containment, it usually is.
Embracing the counterintuitive
Russell’s career has been shaped by the realisation that the most politically popular solutions in transport are often the worst. “If you asked me 20 years ago ... I didn’t understand induced demand. If someone had said that building another road just makes your city worse, I’d have laughed.”
It’s not just a learning curve for politicians. “Most people are like the average member of the public. Your road is congested? The instinctive answer is: add a lane. And it’s wrong.” Yet this simplistic logic still dominates decisions, especially in jurisdictions where freight and trucking interests hold sway. “Often it’s the road lobby from within the transport agency,” Russell explains, pushing a constant supply of shovel-ready road projects regardless of whether they’re actually needed.
Worse, he says, ministers rotate in and out so frequently that even when one finally understands the logic of demand management and mode shift, they’re soon replaced. “By the time they’ve had it explained to them, they’ve moved on and you’re starting from scratch again.”
The city is already ‘full’.
That was the official logic in Sydney for decades, and where we shift the scene of our conversation. Russell has been down under for a few years now, at a very exciting time for infrastructure in NSW, especially as so much had been lacking for a long time. While the city’s population boomed, transport planning stalled. “We were just building virtually nothing,” Russell says. “The thinking was: ‘Sydney is full, so don’t invest.’ It was not good policy and certainly not good transport policy.”
When he joined the New South Wales government, the political and financial stars aligned. The government was ‘asset recycling’, effectively leasing off parts of the electricity grid and reinvesting the proceeds in infrastructure. “We were cashed up in transport to spend the money on improving the system.”
And improve it they did. “We had three light rail projects—George Street, Parramatta, Newcastle—and massive Metro lines: Metro Northwest, City and Southwest, the airport metro, and Parramatta Metro. It was a whirlwind.” It wasn’t just new lines, they also reformed the fare system so passengers weren’t penalised for switching modes and legalised Uber with new point-to-point regulations. “We were becoming an intermodal city, and the fare system had to reflect that.”
But now, Russell says, the money is drying up and the capability that got built up risks going to waste.
The Hidden Risk of Success and Losing the Capability You Just Built
One of the more under-discussed risks in infrastructure isn’t failure of a project, but what happens after a successful one. it’s success. What happens when a city that finally figures out how to build stops building? Russell saw firsthand what it meant to ramp up that major programme of investment in NSW, and the creation of something increasingly rare in much government today; real delivery capability.
But now that the funding pipeline is drying up, we wonder about the consequences for the developed talent and skills. Russell points out how France has avoided this fate; “They built a very highly competent sort of state-owned corporation … and they built metros brilliantly.” Once those projects wrapped up, “they just repurposed that organisation … instead of building metro lines, it’s now building railways regionally.”
Compare that with the Anglosphere’s track record. “In many jurisdictions, you see it kind of… they build up a capability, which is very expensive, they use it for one project, and then you lose it again.
Even more concerning is the lack of benchmarking. “Transport agencies are not great at benchmarking their projects globally,” Russell said. “Are our costs really genuine compared to similar or equivalent projects elsewhere?” The evidence suggests they’re not. “Madrid has done fantastic thinking about dramatically reducing costs,” he said. “I mean …. compared to Sydney, Madrid’s been building its metro lines at almost a tenth of the cost.”
That should be a wake-up call, but instead of interrogating the difference, many governments seem oddly incurious. “We’ve probably been too Anglosphere-oriented in our thinking,” Russell added. Rather than learning from places that have cracked affordability, countries like Australia, the UK, Canada and the US keep copying each other’s bad habits.
That capability gap is often made worse by the differing mentalities in public vs. private delivery. “If the private sector is doing that, they’ll make a lot of compromises,” Russell says, referring to projects like Brightline. While it’s a good project, it does come at a cost of limited integration into the broader system.
Public sector projects, by contrast, often chase perfection with someone else’s money. “It’ll be gold standard and everything will work really well … but typically it will be massively expensive to build and need a huge subsidy every year to continue.” When projects don’t stack up commercially or politically, they stall, and so does the capability and will to deliver them. This is very much the case in when we look at HS2 or California High Speed Rail. Far too much money spent, and a distorted value at best, or inability to come to fruition at worst.
Building infrastructure is only part of the job.
Following on that train of thought around developing and retaining capability for major projects, there’s also the question of how we operate, fund and prioritise transport after it’s built. Too often, the focus on building fades and cities are left with infrastructure they can't afford to run, or worse, the wrong infrastructure altogether.
It’s easy to critique public transport as something heavily subsidised. “Public transport is very heavily subsidised … typically 75% plus is government subsidy,” Russell noted. Passengers feel that cost directly every time they tap a card or buy a ticket.
But what rarely gets acknowledged is that roads are also deeply subsidised. Drivers may not see it, but the costs of road maintenance, expansion, and especially parking are buried in general taxation, land use decisions, and upfront vehicle ownership, making the marginal cost of driving seem artificially low. “The parking subsidy is just huge… [It’s] worth more than all the roads,” Russell said, pointing to Donald Shoup’s research on the hidden cost of ‘free’ parking. “It’s just huge amounts of land being used for free parking, which could be used for much more productive uses. The parking then encourages car use, which makes congestion even worse.”
And yet, the bias toward cars is embedded deep in how transport agencies are structured. At one point I joked that some departments feel less like Ministries of Transport and more like Ministries of Trucking. Russell didn’t disagree. “Exactly,” he said. “It’s more challenging in areas where the governance model is kind of balanced between city and state.” City governments may want better cycling, buses and walkability, but state agencies are still wired to deliver highways and freight corridors.
The result is a systemic underinvestment in the things that actually shift behaviour. “We are massively underinvesting in active transport,” Russell said. “The billions we spend on roads could deliver so much extra bus infrastructure and active transport infrastructure, which would be far more beneficial from a transport perspective—let alone health or the environmental perspective.”
Some places are finding ways to rebalance that. In Sydney, a parking space levy on commercial properties helps fund alternatives. “If you own a commercial building with parking, you pay per space. That money funds public and active transport,” he explained. “It’s how we helped pay for the George Street light rail.”
The challenge is to make that kind of logic more widespread. Cities are getting smarter. They’re figuring out how to shape transport behaviour and land use together. But the systems above them, the state ministries, the funding models, the political defaults are still catching up.
A case for government
Russell is pretty blunt about the internal culture of most transport agencies: “They’ve become very bureaucratic and very siloed.” Different modes like the rail people and the bus people that don’t talk to each other, and infrastructure teams rarely collaborate with the customer experience minds. “Every idea has to go through 8 sign-offs in one silo, and then 8 more in the next. You end up with 16 veto points, and nothing gets done.”
Even the hierarchy slows things down. “You’ve got to go through layers of approval just to get an idea in front of someone who can say yes. That kills creativity. It kills speed. It definitely kills innovation.”
This might be Russell’s most urgent, and under discussed observation. Civil services aren’t just inefficient, they have been hollowed out. “Capacity and capability of the public service? It’s not on anyone’s agenda. Not on the minister’s. Not on the prime minister’s. Not even on the public service’s.”
Talented people leave because they have options, while others don’t even think about joining because there’s other easier and more lucrative career paths elsewhere. Even when you consider Russell’s trajectory, part of it was a bit of an accident and a lucky one at that. “If you’re a really capable person, you don’t stick around. You can do more, with less stress, for more money somewhere else.”
Even the cost saving strategies, which it’s hard to argue against in principle, are backwards. In many instances there might be too many people, carrying significant cost, but in the effort to rationalise, those who bring the most value end up being the ones who exit. Russell explains: “Governments cut staff through natural attrition so they don’t have to pay redundancies. But that means you lose the good people, and keep the ones who can’t get jobs elsewhere.”
It’s why politicians end up creating breakaway agencies to deliver anything ambitious, but that’s a temporary fix. “They build up a great capability, the minister changes, and it gets folded back into the mothership. Where it dies.”
Develop good policies, then make the politics work
I really liked Russell’s response to the regular closing magic wand question. “I would effectively upgrade all of our politicians to try to understand what good policy is, and try to find the right political answers.”
Public transport has always been political, but rarely the headline act, even in the case of big infrastructure projects. In many cases, the machine doesn’t like the politics and would like to make things less political, which is noble, but maybe a bit naive. But if we can have the experts and the bureaucrats minimise the ideologue or the showman in the politician, and help them be the pragmatic strategist who has to navigate political realities, then we all win.
“The best transformative politicians we've ever had… that was always their mindset. What’s the right policy? How do I make the politics work to get it done?”
And maybe that’s a great takeaway to end on, for we don’t lack ideas, but we do lack joined up thinking, strong communication and people willing to think long enough to see something through.
To being Challengers.
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